Quetzalcóatl

Quetzalcoatl is the wind and he is the serpent, and both at once because his name joins them: quetzalli, precious feather, and coatl, serpent. The Mexica counted him among the four sons of the creator pair, alongside Tezcatlipoca the black, Huitzilopochtli the blue and Xipe Totec the red. From those four brothers come the ages of the world, which the sources tell as five successive suns, and in them Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca throw each other down by turns: in the first sun it is Quetzalcoatl who fells Tezcatlipoca with a blow of his staff, and in the second it is Tezcatlipoca who returns it and leaves the world swept away by wind.

But the myth that truly belongs to him is another, and it is that of the bones. With the previous humanity destroyed, Quetzalcoatl goes down to Mictlan to ask the lord of the dead for their remains, and is granted them on impossible conditions. He flees with them, stumbles, the bones break and mix, and that is why men are not all of one size. He grinds them in a basin and waters them with blood drawn from his own body. The present humanity is made of old bone and of the blood of a god who wounded himself so that it might exist.

The feathered serpent is an ancient image shared by many cultures of the region. It is carved at Teotihuacan, on the temple that bears its name, where serpent heads collared with feathers alternate with others wearing a different headdress whose identity specialists still do not agree upon. The feather is the quetzal's, a bird of the cloud forests whose tail plumes were worth more than gold and came by trade from far to the south. To join that feather to the serpent, which is what crawls, is to join sky and earth in a single figure.

As Ehecatl, his wind aspect, he appears not as a serpent but as a man, and is recognised by two things: a buccal mask in the form of a red beak, through which he blows, and a conical cap. On his chest he wears the ehecacozcatl, «the jewel of the wind», which is a sea shell cut across. His temples, unlike all others, were built round, so that the wind would find no corners.

And as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, «lord of the house of dawn», he is the morning star, that is, Venus. The same figure is, according to the hour, serpent, wind and star.

His cult had three capitals: Teotihuacan, Tula and Cholula, whose pyramid is, by volume, the largest ever built. At Tula he was venerated as Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, a priest-king whom legend makes fall: Tezcatlipoca gets him drunk on pulque, holds a mirror before him so that he sees himself old, and induces him to lie with his sister Quetzalpetlatl. Waking in shame, he leaves the city, reaches the coast and burns himself on a pyre; from his ashes rises the morning star. There lies the reason it was said he had gone eastward, and that Venus is he.

And here history must be separated from legend. It is not true that the Mexica took Cortés for Quetzalcoatl returning. There is not a single pre-conquest source that speaks of a prophesied return: the idea appears in the middle of the sixteenth century, above all in book XII of Sahagun's work, written decades after the events and with informants already Christianised. Current historiography regards it as a later construction, useful for explaining the defeat to the defeated and for justifying it to the victors. It is still told because it is a good story, not because it happened.